#empathetic villain

[hussyknee]

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[tacticalgrandma]

*minthara voice* i’m an empath

[milksnake-tea]

sometimes i think about the way sunday is 100% fine with doing fucked up things as long as he thinks the people he’s doing those things to deserve them

[books-books-smolderinglooks]

Never over Wille's "Can you see me?" Really delineates his whole relationship with them. They don't see him, they don't know him. Peak devastation. 💔💔

[adorabledaylilly]

I think the reason people separate Machine!Connor and Deviant!Connor so much as characters is because they don’t actually understand his motivations in the story. They don’t separate Violent!Marcus and Pacifist!Marcus because his motivation doesn’t change, his means do. Same with Kara. But Connors motivation isn’t as clear as theirs is so people default to the difference being caring about the mission or not, when the mission isn’t his motivation. His motivation is self preservation. The desire to be needed and useful; to live. The only difference really being if he is selfish about his self preservation or empathetic. Every defining moment for Connor is rooted in empathy or apathy, does he prioritize his own survival or does he lend empathy to others understanding that they want to live too?

[alphabetcompletionist]

followed you for the blog gimmick but i gotta say i love the wordgirl posting so genuinely if you ever have more wordgirl thoughts please post them wordgirl so based show

surprised how many people are into the show. anyway the butcher sucks so bad. his power's just weird, he's hardly a threat ever, he keeps making the animators draw captain huggyface fat as a sphere, i wish his rump got roasted

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP RSTUVW Y

23/26

[youngpettyqueen]

Repentance is an episode that kind of hits what I think it was trying to say but then also. completely and utterly fails in other areas. which is characteristic of a lot of these types of Trek episodes tbh

[wuxian-vs-wangji]

Okay but what is this class?

So, within the film school were 3 areas of study, and you had to pick ONE to do:

Telecommunication law and policy.

Media Sciences (The academic studies. If they could show you something and put electrodes on your head to read your brain, they're happy)

Design and Production-- actually making shit. Scriptwriting, studio, field production, sound design, editing, etc.

I did a self-created hybrid major, bridging Media Sciences with Design and Production.

----

Laid that ground information because I can only describe the classes from the way I approached them. The media psychology students got something totally different out of it and my brain just doesn't stop where theirs stopped.

If I mention the sex class, I'll end up writing that 100,000 word essay on how it is applied to LITA, so let's talk the horror one (my fav).

What the class does is get into physiologically, what happens to a person while watching horror? A lot of that is really obvious- you can become tense, anxious, your stress levels actually go DOWN overall (which is not how it feels in the moment), and you experience a rush of adrenaline.

Then you dig deeper. What is contributing to the tension? The human brain processes things at different speeds, sight is slower than sound. So sound mixing becomes both critical to creating a horror atmosphere, and also a cheat code. Anything becomes spooky if it SOUNDS spooky.

Monkey brain hear spooky, monkey brain no like spooky. Now it's dark. Monkey brain cannot see danger approach. Monkey brain fight or flight grow big.

Now, if you don't have a valve to bring the tension down (something scary, jump scares are the most lazy way), monkey brain get bored. Monkey brain start adapting to the adrenaline and your adrenal gland is like "Guys this party sucks".

And that's why M. Night Shamalan movies blow. Level tension. So at the end when he tries to ramp it up your brain has already gotten bored and gone home so it's just like "Who the fuck cares".

What else is in horror movies? Violence!

But guess what? Monkey brain feel things if they see gruesome stuff. Boy monkey brains especially.

But what's this? Girl monkey brains are different than boy monkey brains. Girl monkey brains have SO MANY MORE nerve endings (that equals empathy). You show gruesome to girl monkey brain, girl monkey brain is like "childbirth and periods are more gruesome than this" (girl monkey brain not the most feminist, the feminism comes from evolution and enlightenment).

But you show a girl monkey brain the FACE of someone in pain- the agony and the terror... That's going to slam into those nerve endings and activate Empathy Mode- and now you can imagine how that violence FEELS.

Know your demographic- based on your subject matter, the likely ratio of boy monkey brains to cater to vs girl monkey brains. Set your balance of violence and face shots to keep both on the same page with that tension you are rising and lowering.

And I did say I didn't want to get into the sex one because I don't want to rabbit hole, but sex and horror tend to walk hand in hand because they're such primal triggers.

That's the "monkey brain" theme up there. They are not speaking to you as a rational human person. They're speaking to the root code of your DNA (do not try to hijack my post to argue anti-feminist things because of monkey brain, I'm talking horror and sex).

They're poking at instinctive responses you do not consciously control on average.

So yeah

I created a hybrid major track for myself within the department (I love that my uni gave students the freedom to do that) to study media psychology and apply it not to research on the human condition, but to learn to basically brain wash and mind control my audiences.

To reach into the monkey brain and hypnotize them until they end up- as the video game design majors would say- in a flow-state where time stops existing. Just the story is left. Like a dream you don't realize you are dreaming.

... ... ... When my professor realized how I was mixing the two tracks, he started calling it the Super Villain Major.

I have no regrets.

[pangolinheart]

How does Rhiki feels about Zenos? How does she reflect on her relationship with him? or any other villain, doesn't need to be Zenos precisely. How does she feel about them?

Hahahaha....

Rhiki's feelings on Zenos are: complete and total apathy. Rhiki looks at Zenos' face and feels Nothing. She doesn't resent him, she doesn't hate him, she doesn't relate to him. She has No Strong Feelings. To her, he's just Some Guy - a garden-variety psychopath in ugly armor, functionally indistinguishable from any other Garlean Legatus.

He met her a total of 3 times and on the third time started monologuing about how they were inextricably linked, two sides of the same coin, bound to forever clash, reveling in the thrill of the hunt, etc., etc., to which Rhiki's reaction was essentially, "Sir, this is a Wendy's."

It took her an exceptionally long time to be able to put his name and his face together - the names of Garlemald's elite are long and in the long run not very important to her. I imagine strategy meetings during Stormblood going like:

Alphinaud: Before we can act, we will need to ascertain Zenos' location. Z'rhiki, raising her hand: Which one is Zenos again? Alphinaud: Rhiki, Zenos yae Galvus is the crown prince of Garlemald. Z'rhiki, staring blankly: ... Alphinaud, increasingly exasperated: The son of emperor Varis zos Galvus? The leader of the XIIth Imperial Legion? Z'rhiki: Uhhh... Alisaie: He's the one in the ugly maroon armor with the horned skull helmet. Z'rhiki: OH! That guy!

There are some villains she has stronger feelings about, though. During Stormblood she felt a lot of sympathy for Yotsuyu and especially Fordola. They had both been through some terrible things, and Rhiki had gotten a taste of what that kind of pain and anger can do to a person. She was glad when the Alliance decided to spare Fordola's life, even if Fordola wasn't. She really hoped that "Tsuyu" would never remember her life as Yotsuyu and could live out the rest of her days in peace, andwas a little heartbroken when the whole thing fell apart.

Z'rhiki also had sympathy for Emet Selch at the very end. Not that much, given all of the... everything he'd done up to that point, but definitely some. He was grieving for his friends and his home, for a place and a time and a life that would never exist again, even if he had succeeded in rejoining Etheirys. It was something that she could understand.

(Before that, though, she mostly found him condescending and annoying, and generally just acted as if he wasn't there most of the time.)

The only villains Rhiki ever really hated were the Knights of the Heavens' Ward, for reasons that are, I'm sure, fairly obvious. I don't think Rhiki had ever really hated anyone before that. Disliked, been annoyed with, been upset with, sure. But not hated. But whooo boy she hated Zephirin and Thordan enough to make up for all of the hating she missed out on. It may have also been the first time she felt real rage. She was so angry that it scared her. Triumphing over Thordan's primal was extremely unsatisfying, and afterwards she realized it was because she didn't just want to defeat them, she wanted them to suffer. She wanted to tear Zephirin's heart out with her bare hands and make him eat it. She had never known that she had that sort of anger and violence inside of her before, and it was really difficult to come to terms with.

[wlwaerith]

se: ok so your character is the warrior of light. they are a hero and a very good & kind person who is well-known for their compassion & willingness to help everyone :)

me: mmmmmmmmmm can’t hear u over the sound of making varinia a horrible person

[owlsong74]

anyway for the next haunted mansion adaptation that requires a proper plot, they make constance a morally gray villain or antihero kind of character.

that or make it a goofy animated hijinks comedy using the ballroom and graveyard ghosts more prominantly and using the medium to portray the ghosts as accurate to the ride stylizations.

i will take either

[hikaaa-bi]

i just hate how people nowadays see a character who wants peace and treats everyone with kindness, and goes "ew they're such a pushover". what do you get with these edgy grimdark protags who are selfish and apathetic? confirmation to your depressing nihilism?

[knnave]

need arlecchino to be cruel and unrelenting but also need a relationship based off the quote "when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you love it"

[kawaiijellymonster]

just saw a thing on pinterest that said that getou sucks as a villain, imagine being so wrong, couldn't be me

[acoldsovereign]

{{ Also, before I confuse anyone because I can sense an anon coming on-

Maiz is not ashamed or embarrassed of what she did to gain Trunks' attention. She is mortified (hiding her face in her hands) because she is compelled to be Vulnerable™ and that is a big Ick for her, even at that stage of their relationship where she doesn't exactly qualify as a tyrant/dictator anymore. She is uncomfortable because she's never, EVER, ever told Trunks why she did any of those things nor has she been THAT candid about how she felt about him and how exactly those feelings turned into fondness into (a sick, twisted yet genuine form of) love. It is the equivalent of telling your crush you like them and they say they like you back but then they ask you WHY you like them and you're shitting your pants because you didn't expect to be put on the spot like that.

Unfortunately I am a cruel, sadistic God and I don't care, get uncomfy so you can grow, NERD

[sidesteppostinghours]

i scream a little whenever i think about caines 'gone soft/driven' achievement juxtaposition and thats just how it has to be sometimes